USB sniffing in linux

[Robert] sent in this tutorial on how to set up USB sniffing in linux. Useful for seeing exactly what is being communicated to and from your USB devices, this ability is built into linux. [Bert], the author, shows us the steps involved and how to filter it to get the data we desire. You can specify exactly which device to capture data from. His example, shown above, is a session with an Arduino.

I was trying this out and I had some issues. At the cat /sys/kernel/debug/usbmon/lu I get a “cat: lu: No such file or directory” so I went and check and the file is indeed there, I even moved to that folder and did a cat lu and same deal. Im not an advanced linux user so any help with this would be appreciated

I can’t see how this can be useful to do on linux, don’t get me wrong, i love linux, but the only use i can see for this is reverse engineering proprietary usb devices/protocols, and most if not all proprietary devices run solely on windows. the device needs to be running like normal to understand how it communicates, and for that it requires winblows.

I’m thinking the same thing as joe57005. It would be very useful if there was a way to get the device to run normally…issue a command w/proprietary app and watch the packets sent/received to/from the device. of course, you’d still need windows to run the proprietary app in most cases.

The only other thing I can think of where this would be useful is if you are designing a USB device yourself. It could be extremely valuable as a debug tool during the software development phase.